Multiplayer Gaming Pioneer
Danielle Bunten Berry 1949-1998
Danielle Bunten Berry, one of the pioneers in the development of multiplayer computer games, died on July 3 from lung cancer. She was 49 years old.
She was renowned in the computer gaming industry for her achievements in multiplayer gaming, for her games long predated such famous titles as "Doom" and "Quake"
Here is a tribute from Dan Costikyan, a colleague in the computer gaming industry:
Dani Bunten Berry was a giant.
I don't mean that she stood six-foot-two, although she did.
I mean that she was one of the great artists of our age, one of the creators of the form that will
dominate the 21st century, as film has dominated the 20th and the novel the 19th: the art of game design.
I mean that she displayed a complete mastery of her craft, always pushing the edges of the possible, always producing
highly polished work of gem-like consistency and internal integrity.
I mean that in her writings and her speeches (many available at her professional
website), she demonstrated enormous thoughtfulness about her chosen field, a level of
intellectual analysis matched by a mere handful of contemporaries.
Her whole vision of "the game" was as a form of social
interaction. From the very first, her games were multiplayer, at
a time when the internet was the ARPANET, when modems
were acoustic couplers used to connect to academic
computers, when the technological infrastructure to permit
online gaming was simply nonexistent. She saw that, however
engaging play with a machine might be made, it was ultimately
void, because it created no engagement with other people.
From the very first, Bunten designed for multiple players, and
indeed only two of her games (Seven Cities of Gold and Heart
of Africa) were solitaire-only. Her first game, Wheeler Dealers,
published in 1978 for the Apple II, came packaged with a
custom input device for four people--the only way to permit
simultaneous play at the time. Most of Bunten's early work was
for the Atari 800, which remains the only personal computer to
ship with hardware for play by multiple players; and her games
of the late '80s and early '90s (Modem Wars, Command HQ, and Global Conquest) were
all designed around modem or network play.
In short, Bunten's games were designed at a time when supporting multiple players was
hard. And it is a particular tragedy that her career should be cut short at this unhappy
juncture, now that network gaming is burgeoning--a tragedy not solely for Dani, but for all
of us, for she understood the requirements and aesthetic of multiplayer gaming better
than anyone else in the field.
Dani was understandably reticent about her private life.
She grew up in Arkansas, where she continued to live, at
some cost to her career, throughout her life. She was the
eldest of six childen--five boys and one girl. She was not
the girl.
She once said that one of the
reasons she loved games was
that the only times her family
spent together that weren't
totally dysfunctional was when
they were playing games.
She was married twice, both
times before her "pronoun
change," as she called it. She
had three children by her
second wife; she remained
devoted to her children even
after the marriage foundered.
One of the agonies of her later
years was that the degree of
her estrangement from her
former spouse made it difficult to maintain her relationship with her children whom, by all
evidence, she adored.
"Danielle" maintained that she was a nicer person than "Dan" had been; but whatever the
gender, she was remarkably free of the egotism and arrogance of so many designers.
She viewed her own work with an analytical, often dyspeptic eye, recognizing her flaws
perhaps more often than her virtues. Though her career was badly damaged by her
abandonment of the field during and after her change of gender, she never expressed
remorse or bitterness about the difficulty of reestablishing herself as a designer, a
process still under way at the moment of her death.
Those who knew her in the field remark upon her charm,
patience, and generosity of spirit. Whatever demons she struggled with during her life,
the product of the struggle was a degree of insight, humility, and sympathy which made
of her not merely a fine game designer but also a fine human being.
This year, at the Computer Game Developer's Conference, she was awarded the CGDA
Lifetime Achievement Award. These things, alas, tend to be awarded to the dying. But
certainly no one in the field deserved it more.
When, in some halcyon future day, the merits and artistry of computer games are
recognized, when games are understood as works of art, when the history of game
design receives the attention it deserves, Dani Bunten Berry's contributions will at last be
understood by more than the handful of people who knew her.
The future? At times, it seems, the future flows desultorily toward us, slowly meandering
like the lethargic Mississippi; that glorious day is not here yet, and the measure of that
fact is that many who read this will never before have heard of Danielle Berry, nor yet of
Dan Bunten.
And at other times, the future approaches all too quickly, coming on us so fast that only a
distant crash, behind us, registers the fall of a giant.
Dani died on July 3rd, 1998, at friend's home in Little Rock of metastatic lung cancer. She was not yet 50.
There is a Memorial Page for Danielle you can view for further information.
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